A Complete Competitive Programming Roadmap
Competitive Programming Roadmap: Whether you are a high schooler, a university student, or a careered developer, this is the perfect time to start with competitive programming. Yeah, you heard it right! Competitive programming does not have age-barrier or portfolio limitations. It only requires a passionate spirit with some love for coding.
A Complete Competitive Programming Roadmap
In general, most hiring programs for software engineers include a technical interview component. These interviews usually consist of coding rounds which require a solid understanding of data structures & algorithms. Since these are the core parts of competitive programming, participating in these competitions can serve as great preparation for technical interviews.
This blog post is geared towards those who have ever thought about or tried to start competitive programming but moved on before seeing it through. Let’s dig into competitive programming by answering all the Why(s), What(s) & How(s)!
What is Competitive Programming?
As Wikipedia says, competitive programming is a mind sport usually held over the Internet or a local network, involving participants trying to program according to provided specifications.
In other words, it is a type of contest where a number of programmers attempt to solve programming questions in a limited amount of time. You can write your solution in any programming language that you’re comfortable with, and your solutions are judged by online judges. Solutions should pass all of the test cases (given and hidden) in order to be accepted under certain time and space limits.
A lot of big tech companies, like Facebook and Google, hire through competitive programming competitions. As an added bonus, various online competitions offer some amazing prizes for the winners.
Benefits of Competitive Programming
Crack the Coding Interviews
Often in coding interviews, companies will present modified versions of easy and medium-level questions from competitive coding. Participating in competitions provides familiarity and confidence in coding interviews to get a leg up on internships and job offers from reputable companies.
Problem Solving Skills
One of the real benefits of competitive coding comes when we start solving problems on our own. During the contest, you will be given some real-word problems that need to be solved in the best possible way in a limited amount of time. This increases our analytical thinking abilities and improves logic building, which translates to developing key skills required to build real-life products.
Strengthen your Software Practices
Competitive programming helps us to build up logic thinking skills, write clean code, better understand the functions and modules, analyze and interpret several alternatives and features, and finally, bring meaningful insight to software products.
Land a Position in your Dream Company
Various companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. conduct online coding competitions where they directly hire candidates based on their performance in the competition.
Working as a Team
Most coding competitions happen in groups of 2–4 people. Coding alongside different individuals with diverse background and experience levels can be a great way to learn and gain different perspectives. It also encourages strengthening of coordination and management skills, which are often the key to acing coding competitions.
How do I get started? Is there a roadmap or a guide?
Pick a suitable programming language
You can do competitive programming in any programming language — C/C++, Java, and Python are highly recommended. Learn about all the syntaxes, built-in functions, templates, snippets, and library functions such as STL in C++, Big Integers in Java, etc. Working with the fundamentals will bring long term benefit to any individual.
Choose a powerful code editor
You will be working to solve many problems. To increase the speed and efficiency of your work, it is recommended that you write your code in a code editor. VS Code, Sublime Text 3, Pharm & Vim are some of the popular editors where you can use their cool features and practice your craft. Use STL, snippets, and templates whenever you can; it not only saves your code length but also decreases the time to write your code. Now you can focus mainly on solving the actual logic of the problems.
Read Full Article at : https://codewithgeeks.com/competitive-programming-roadmap/